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14 / A Jewish Response:The Lure and Limits of Universalizing Our Faith Traditional Judaism has a reasonably well-defined attitude to non-Jewish religions. The Torah describes God as making a covenant with Noah and thus, through Noah and his children, with all of humanity. The rabbis made this covenant the basis of their authoritative rulings about the religious status of non-Jews. They and all the Judaism that flowed from them considered the covenant with Noah to be real and continuing. Rabbinic Judaism thus believes all people know what God wants of them and can achieve their salvation. But as the Torah story of Noah immediately makes clear, humankind regularly violates its covenant responsibilities to God. The rabbis generally believed that the children of Noah were obligated to carry out seven root commandments: not to blaspheme God, or worship idols, or murder, or steal, or be sexually degenerate, or cut limbs from living animals, and, positively, to set up courts of justice. Even as the descendents of Noah built a tower to enter heaven and gain a name, so the rabbis saw most of humanity behaving sinfully and thus deserving of God’s judgment. The Torah understands the covenant with Abraham as a compensation for the sinfulness of humanity. The covenant with Noah is not abrogated by God. Rather God establishes a special covenant so that the divine rule may be properly established among people. Covenant being essentially a relationship of obligation, the Jews fulfill God’s special purpose by living in special intensity under God’s law. They proclaim the reality of God’s rule by doing the commandments, personally and communally ; by example, they set a standard for humanity. 171 1978 Proselytizing has little role in Judaism. People do not need to be Jews; they need only be pious Noachides. So the Jews have no command to convert anyone. They do accept converts and, in love of their faith, occasionally seek to have others adopt it. The rabbis acknowledged that unconverted individuals among “the nations” could be fully righteous and thus “saved.” The comment, “The pious among the gentiles have a share in the life of the world to come,” may be taken as the standard Jewish attitude. The rabbis, like the Bible, were, however, spiritually pessimistic about human collectives and freely speculated that they would not survive the post-messianic judgment day. In our own time, the experience of the Holocaust, perpetrated by a nation steeped in Christianity and a leader of modern culture, has reinforced those traditional attitudes. While still hopeful about individuals, we are skeptical if not cynical about claims for the goodness of human nature, the progress of civilization, or the way institutions will transform humanity. If I forbear from discussing the Holocaust further it is because I take it for granted that its horrifying reality is a motive for and an assumption of our discussion of world interreligious relationships. Yet for all this doctrine, the only gentile religion the rabbis directly dealt with was idolatry. Succeeding generations have had to fill in Judaism’s judgment of other religions. With regard to Christianity this involved a consideration of whether it was not another form of idol worship . Its use of icons, its veneration of saints, and particularly its doctrine of the Christ as a person of the triune God, seemed the equivalent of idolatry. The slow development of a relatively positive assessment of Christianity has been beautifully traced by Jacob Katz in his Exclusiveness and Tolerance and needs no further statement here.1 Islam being radically monotheistic caused many fewer problems. Most Jewish thinkers today see pious Christians and Muslims as fulfilling the Noachian covenant, and thus as “saved.” A minority opinion remains that their worship is the equivalent of idolatry; also some modern Jews have tried to give these religions a more than Noachian status, in line with their own claims, but no such view has gained even substantial minority support. This is as far as the Jewish theory of other religions has gone. In sum, humanity does not need to be Jewish but God needs Jews and Judaism to achieve the divine purposes with humanity. This sense of the Jews as chosen and special but only instrumental to the establishment of God’s kingdom is so great that some rabbis can see the ultimate disappearance of Jewish distinctiveness at the conclusion of the eschatological drama, though most love the Jewish people too 172 A Track [18.191.211.66] Project MUSE...

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